Warbat

Warbat (وربات) is a Levantine sweet made by layering and baking thin sheets of dough, combining them with cream or another filling, and pouring syrup over them. It is also widely known as shaabiyat (شعيبيات). The edges of each triangle show many thin layers, and the inside holds a white milk filling. The pleasure of this sweet is tasting the crisp bite of the dry pastry together with the soft center.

Not laminated puff pastry, but stacked paper-thin sheets

The typical dough is phyllo (filo). This paper-thin, unleavened wheat dough is spread out one sheet at a time, brushed with fat and stacked. The layers form at a different stage from puff pastry, where a block of butter is wrapped in dough and folded in. Here, dough that is already thin is built up with fat between the sheets.

The stacked dough is cut into squares, filling is placed in the center, and each square is folded in half along the diagonal to make a triangle. How many sheets are stacked and how large the squares are cut depends on the recipe (the proportions of ingredients and the method). Simply adding more sheets does not mean the pastry will be done in the same baking time; thickness, the amount of fat and the amount of filling all affect how it bakes.

Each sheet is brushed with melted butter or ghee. This keeps the thin sheets from fusing into a single mass, so that the layers can be felt after baking. Ghee is milk fat with the water and milk solids removed, and some products and households use vegetable fat instead. The way the baked edges flake off in thin pieces comes from this method of stacking.

Cool the filling first so it holds its shape

The white filling, ashta, is the name for a rich milk cream. Present-day home recipes also make it by cooking milk and cream with cornstarch. Cream traditionally gathered from the top of milk and a filling whose firmness is adjusted with starch are not made in the same way.

In some methods, the filling wrapped into warbat before baking is cooked first and cooled thoroughly. Once cooled and firmer, it is easier to enclose in the dough than if used while still warm and runny. When a floral aroma is added, orange blossom water or rose water is mixed into the cooked filling. Because a moist filling goes inside a thin, fat-laden casing, it matters to finish the two separately and then bring them together.

There are also versions with a semolina filling, or with nuts or sweet cheese. When the cream-filled version is specified, it is called warbat bil ashta. Its difference from baklava is not only a matter of “triangle or square”; it also becomes clear in what is wrapped at the center.

In some methods, the cream is filled in after baking. The cook Rouba Shahin bakes the stacked dough, pours syrup over it, lets it cool a little, then opens the layers and pipes in ashta. Compared with methods that wrap the filling before baking, the cream is added at a different point.

Adding syrup to the baked pastry

After the dough has baked until well colored, a sugar syrup is poured over it. Some recipes add flower water or lemon to this syrup, called attar. Rather than soaking the dough in liquid before baking, the sequence is to add sweetness and moisture after the thin layers have baked.

Using less syrup brings the crispness of the layers to the fore, while using more increases moistness and sweetness. Because the cream also passes moisture to the pastry, the texture of the edges and center differs between freshly baked pieces and those that have stood for a while. Warbat is not just about the outward look of how many layers it has; it is a sweet made by preparing fat-brushed dough, filling and syrup separately and then combining them.

Şöbiyet of Gaziantep

In Gaziantep, in southeastern Türkiye, there is şöbiyet, in which a milk filling is wrapped in thin dough. “Gaziantep Şöbiyeti / Antep Şöbiyeti” was registered as a Turkish geographical indication in 2022. According to the document setting out the local method, 12 sheets of thin baklava dough are stacked and cut into squares, topped with kaymak made by cooking milk and semolina and with coarsely crushed Antep pistachios, and folded into triangles.

The pastries are brushed with clarified butter and baked, warm sugar syrup is poured over them while hot, and once it has soaked in, pistachios are scattered on top. The structure of wrapping a milk filling in thin dough and adding syrup after baking has much in common with warbat, but the number of 12 sheets and the ingredient standards are conditions set for this registered name.

Shaabiyat in a 19th-century cookbook

The Tadhkirat al-Khawatin wa-Ustadh al-Tabbakhin, published in Beirut in 1885 and attributed to Khalil Sarkis, includes a method for shaabiyat. Thin dough left over from a large baking pan is cut into squares, filled with baklava filling, arranged in a pan, baked in the oven, and finished with syrup. There is no instruction to fold it into triangles.

Nor is there any instruction for making the white milk filling set with cornstarch that is common in present-day home recipes. The baklava filling of the old book and today’s well-known cream filling are different. On the other hand, the construction of cutting thin dough, filling it, and adding syrup after baking is shared. When and how the filling changed to cream cannot be determined from this record.

Warbat scattered with pistachios. Small sweets made of stacked thin dough are lined up. Photo: Zingo ringo, 2025-03-25, location unknown. Original image / CC BY-SA 4.0. Reduced version from the distributor, no additional processing.

Differences between towns and homes under the same name

Warbat and shaabiyat are found in Jordan, Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and elsewhere. The Jordanian sweet shop Anabtawi also sells a cream-filled version, and Lebanese home cooking uses the name shaabiyat. The boundaries are not clear enough to assign the names to countries on a one-to-one basis, and usage also varies by shop and speaker.

During Ramadan, it is one of the sweets served after iftar, the meal that breaks the fast after sunset. It can be divided into individual portions from a large baking pan, with the milk filling served wrapped in thin dough for each person. A single small triangle holds both the work of stacking dough one sheet at a time and the work of preparing a filling that does not run.

Triangular warbat with stacked thin layers visible at the edges. Photo: Mervat Salman, CC BY-SA 4.0, original image. Not processed in this work.

Glossary